It’s hard to sum up the state of the labour market in one statistic, but that doesn’t stop us trying. The most commonly used figure is of course the unemployment rate, but that can hide some interesting developments in the world of work, like if people have their hours cut or if others leave the labour force entirely. I generally prefer the employment-to-population ratio, which tells us the proportion of working age people (usually just everyone aged 15 and over) who are in work. Still, the employment-to-population ratio doesn’t tell us about changes between part-time and full-time work.

For that reason, I’ve been looking at this measure that I’ve spliced together from the Labour Force statistics: the number of hours worked in a given month, per working age person (everyone 15+). This is a bit like the employment-to-population ratio, but it uses hours rather than employed persons as the numerator.

The hours worked-to-population ratio

This chart tells us that there isn’t as much work to go around as there was before the GFC, but we’re doing better than we were in early 2009. The number of hours per person flattened out in 2011, dipped in January and has recovered some lost ground in March.

Why wouldn’t the age pension aged be relevant? If they are included in the population Matt’s graphing, and population ageing is making them a proportionally larger group (mostly non-working) then surely an overall downward trend is a given. That effect would need to be removed. Mind you, the period involved in the chart is presumably too short for this to be much of an influence.

One thing to bear in mind is that this doesn’t tell us anything about the distribution of hours among individuals – the ratio could rise because of an increase in overtime worked by FT workers, or by a rise in the number of employed persons.

I was surprised that the ABS don’t put a measure out like that themselves, but come to think of it they only put out an emp-to-pop measure don’t they? Hmm, actually it seems funny now that more people don’t use it!

Hi Matt
Interesting Post. One way you could get around the whole overtime issue is to use actual hours worked in main job and compare it to usual hours worked. I think its published in the second release. Theres also the reasons worked less than 35 hours data cube as well. So you could calculate “extra hours” from the actual minus usual split. Problem is if you look at the survey its impossible to get usual hours worked in main job if someone has more than one job…bit of a bummer I know but worth a crack.